Whiskeytown Lake NY -> CA (and back), 2021

Whiskeytown’s 3rd and final studio album was released on 22 May 2001.

Recorded in 1999, the album remained unreleased for almost 2 years as the band’s label was shut down during the merger between Polydor and Universal Music. The band broke up before the album was released. “If Pneumonia had come out when it was supposed to back in 1999, there would probably still be a Whiskeytown today,” said Mike Daly (who co-wrote 7 of 15 songs on the album) in 2001.

I loved Whiskeytown when I was younger, and after they imploded Ryan Adams released his first solo album, Heartbreaker about two months before I turned nineteen. It remains I think a really good record, romantic and self-absorbed and despairing in a way that speaks unusually loudly to someone very young. I listened to it endlessly while I was in a particularly bad place, both emotionally and physically, living in a motel during a cold and bleak winter in Carthage, Texas, more or less alone. I wasn't more than 90 minutes away from friends and family, but it felt at the time like I might as well have been on the moon, and Heartbreaker was one of the records that kept me tethered to the world. 

Adams put out another record shortly after, called Gold, that shed most of what made his earlier work with Whiskeytown and on Heartbreaker so compelling. I listened to it recently for the first time in many years and what struck me the most was how it made no attempt to disguise its obvious ambitions: this was the album that was designed to make Adams a star, and the pictures in the CD booklet of him lounging in bed, smoking cigarettes and playing with a pistol while nuzzling some anonymous woman (the singer-songwriter Leona Naess, to whom Adams was at one time engaged?) seemed especially callow to me, empty poses, preening and vain. 

It was around the time that Gold came out that I began to see interviews and read stories about Adams in magazines, and what came to light was rarely pleasant: what came through was that Adams, regardless of whatever talents he might have, was basically an asshole. He continued to release increasingly mediocre albums, and at some point the quality of the material began to be seriously outweighed by the defects of his personality. I stopped buying his records nearly fifteen years ago, and would check in every now and again only to have my decision vindicated. 

And now it's been revealed that not only is he an asshole, he's perhaps a criminal too. All I can say to that is I hope it's not true if only for the sake of the victim. But I suspect otherwise. 

I wish I could say I was surprised by this news, but Adams' bad behavior has been a matter of public record for so long that the only surprise to be had is that this didn't come to light sooner, but Adams has had the power to keep his accusers in check, and more importantly, an industry with the ability to protect him, a Boys Will Be Boys attitude that is endemic, which is the most troubling thing of all.